Elon Musk Announces New ‘Temporary’ Measures To Address Issues On Twitter

 Twitter owner Elon Musk announced on Saturday new measures that he is implementing for a period of time to address platform manipulation and “extreme levels of data scraping.”

“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, New unverified accounts to 300/day,” Musk tweeted.

The news comes as Twitter cracked down on people’s ability to view tweets on the social media site unless they were logged in to a registered Twitter account.

People who had tried to view content on the platform without being signed in to a Twitter account were rerouted to a landing page that gave them the option to create a new account or sign in to an existing account.

Musk addressed the matter on Friday when responding to a tweet from Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, who wrote: “The internet feels increasingly broken. News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled. Web browsing feels horrible now.”

“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk responded. “What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.”

Sweeney responded, “Thwart scraping patterns with infosec engineering, forbid bad forms of scraping in terms of service, add a volume based liquidated damages clause, prominently litigate against large scale commercial abuse.”

Musk replied by noting that he was already doing those things.

“1. Scraping is already disallowed by T&C,” he responded. “2. The scraping orgs dgaf & mask their IPs through proxy servers or through orgs that appear legit. For example, a recent massive scraping operation originating from Oracle IP addresses was just using their servers as a laundromat. 3. We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now.”